Meteorology, Meteorological, History

An IGO
monit-
oring
weather and
climate
change

HISTORY OF EUMETSAT, p87.

HISTORY OF EUMETSAT, p85.

p86.

contracts with national industries roughly in accordance with the percentage the country has invested in the project. In a joint ESA-EUMETSAT strategy, that policy would automatically apply to ESA's share of the contracts. In a cooperative arrangement with NOAA, it would not.

Larger factors than cost-effective weather satellites would, therefore, come into play. Those countries with a less developed aerospace industry and which viewed their contribution to ESA programmes partly as a means of building this sector (there are many strategic reasons that go beyond space alone why this is important to nations), would find joint procurement with NOAA difficult to accept. Larger political issues therefore constrained EUMETSATs choices at this stage in the development of a polar orbiting system, and the PAC discussed at length whether it was right to negotiate with NOAA given that some countries might ultimately veto the idea on political or financial grounds.

Delegates had widely different views but unhappiness about relationships with ESA over a polar orbiting system had reached a point that prompted the French delegate to ask if the issue should be raised at a political level. And as a result of this deep unhappiness, the PAC concluded that the Secretariat should continue the work it was doing on all three options approved by the previous Council meeting, including discussions with NOAA.

By the time of the eleventh Council meeting in December 1989, the unhappiness with ESA's polar plans is clear to see in the Council minutes. Bizzarro Bizzarri, the Chairman of the STG and the Italian delegate to the ESA PB-EO, reported that the 400 kilograms allocated for meteorological instruments on the polar platform was not enough. It is clear, too, that ESA's Executive had its own problems. Some of these were not unusual for the early stages of a space project. For example, demand for space on the polar platform was growing and instruments were frequently exceeding their mass limitation. At the same time, more difficult political problems existed. ESA Member States had not committed to the second European Remote Sensing satellite (ERS-2), a flagship programme in ESA's Earth observation strategy. Given the reluctance of the Agency's Member States to commit to the ERS series, the ESA Executive was not in a strong position to ask its Member States to fund a follow-on to the POEM-Ml polar satellite.

Unable to do anything else, EUMETSAT delegates requested the Director to establish a list of requirements for the polar platform and asked him to seek a response from ESA about the list as soon as possible. In the meantime, the Secretariat was requested to continue its study of alternatives.

In this unsatisfactory fashion for the EPS, 1989 came to an end.

In February 1990, Professor Reimar LÜ st, the Director-General of ESA, wrote to Morgan formally offering a free flight on the polar platform for basic EUMETSAT/NOAA meteorological missions. The STG analysed the details and recommended that the Council should not accept the offer. Once again the major sticking point was that EUMETSAT needed ESA to develop a space segment - a satellite - that could be taken over operationally. The polar platform was too large

SEE ALSO| |

1. Meteorologists shed political shackles, a review of Declan Murphy's history of the first 25 years of EUMETSAT (2011), by Helen Gavaghan.

2. An interview in 2010 with Dr Tillman Mohr, a special advisor to the secretary general of the World Meteorological Organisation, in Science, People & Politics.

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Contents

Preface

Foreword

Introduction

Ch.1

Ch.2

Ch.3

Ch.4

Ch.5

Ch.6

Ch.7

Ch.8

Eumetsat meteorology meteorological artificial satellites
European Space Agency weather climate policy politics history